If you have a site with a large traffic stream you can use your site search data to come up with ideas on what content to create, what products to add to your store, and what keywords to bid on. Acting early on keyword data is important no matter what site you publish.

PPC margins In many affiliate markets the large profits happen early when the market is still inefficient, and margins are drastically lowered as more affiliates compete. Automatically adding your internal search keywords to your PPC ad accounts allows you to arbitrage the keywords while they have a fat profit margin.

Organic rankings if you rank early and pick up a couple self-reinforcing links it gets much harder for people entering the field later to compete with you.

If you have a strong brand you may be able to use internal search data to automatically create related searches, which creates relevant content on those pages.

Ken Robinson spoke at TED about creativity and mentioned Epiphany, the name of a new book name that he was working on.

That book has yet to come out, but enough people searched for it at Amazon.com that they added the keywords to related searches.

And since they are first to market they are already ranking in Google. When the book comes out they will already control that traffic stream.

This related searches tip can be used in a way that looks spammy or a way that looks legitimate. It is up to the user to decide how far they want to go with it. ;)

Comments

Awesome find Aaron, and thanks for sharing that. It's occurred to me that if you know that a competitor is doing this, that you can essentially track what new pages they create with a scraper and piggyback off their research and work.

While you won't be first to market, it can help you catch up quickly before others join for those times where someone gets the jump on you. Or in a situation like this one, before the book comes out. What do you think?

Good thoughts - I have been using a combination of Wordpress tags and pre populated search keywords to produce "extra" relevant content. Being able to produce those keywords "ahead of time" hadn't occurred to me. I suppose we don't all have Amazon's resources.

I have always looked up to Amazon for useability, online sales tactics etc. They always seem to have some great SEO in many areas but Listmania really got me.